Comments on: On super-tasting

By: Larry Stanton

Larry Stanton — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:01:59 +0000

First off, I wish to thank Steve for taking the time to come to Paso Robles, and at have all of us get a chance to have a real wine critic taste our wines. As Steve said, Paso has made enormous strides and our best days are ahead of us. Let me think…has anyone else offered to come to Paso and taste our wines? Hmmm…no, i don’t think so. Steve DID come to Paso, and for all of us here, we thank him for doing a job I can not imagine ever being able to do. Do I believe Steve can do 100 wines at one sitting? Actually I do, but would put it in the category of an Olympic feat, and obviously intense training over yrs allows him to do it. By his own admission, he prefers 12-15 “like” flites, but even that can’t always be perfect.

There are some 200+ labels here in Paso, many of which most folks have never heard. I have been here a mere 32 yrs now, and the caliber of a number of wines in Paso is extraordinary. My guess is many really good vintners live here who nobody has heard of. 32 yrs ago we had not much. Now we do, but still struggle with Rodney Dangerfield’s “I don’t get no respect”. Having a respected critic, who actually makes the effort to come here and taste 9 dozen wines doesn’t deserve the negatives i read above. In fact, he deserves recognition for a Heruclean feat. I repeat, we in Paso thank him. There aren’t many other folks who would have attempted such a thing…let alone , actually have done it.

By: Charlie Olken

Charlie Olken — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:08:08 +0000

Dylan–

It all depends on the purpose and the intensity of what you are doing. It is not impossible to sample a hundred wines and to come up with general concepts of what was tasted.

It is next to impossible to do it accurately when tryint to take detailed notes worthy of presentation to others and therefore to hold up to any reasonably critical standard of professionalism.

That is why so many of us refuse to participate in those kinds of judgings. They are like the swim-suit competitions at a beauty pageant in which intellignence, nuance and depth are lost in exchange for upfront attractions.

Sorry, but Olympic tasting is, to me, a misnomer. Death march may be too extreme, but any time tasting acuity is compromised, the tasting format is less than perfect for detailed professional judgment.

Sure, I go to UGC, ZAP, Rhone Rangers, but I do not try to post tasting notes on everything I taste there. For me at least, that is an invitation to inaccuracy that needs to be avoided when possible and understood for what it is and is not when it cannot be avoided.

By: Dylan

Dylan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:29:51 +0000

Daunting, yes. But those large tasting events also offer a great opportunity for range–suffice your ability to gauge said range after multiple wines. It’s something you must have to build up to and a talent to acquire. Like Steve said, the Olympics of tasting requires Olympic condition.

By: bruce

bruce — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:47:38 +0000

Couldn’t agree more w/Charles. Twenty wines tests the limits of the palate, let alone hundreds. At last year’s Wine Literary Awards, we were presented with 1000 wines (none-blind), I’m sure which helped promote the event, but it’s preposterous to think that even in the six hours alloted time, one could get through the lot. I “struggled” through about three dozen or so of what I thought might be the most interesting in the group before palate fatigue set in and I had to quit. And even if you spit every wine, minute amounts of alcohol still are absorbed into the body. 106 times the smallest amount of wine is going to have an impact on the senses and acuity.

By: Charlie Olken

Charlie Olken — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:01:55 +0000

I have learned over the years what works best for me. If my palate is reasonably representative of wine professionals, then tasting more than a dozen or dozen and a half wines is a good way to get inaccurate tasting results–and thus inaccurate recommendations to the very people who look to me for recommendations.

My own regimen is to taste blind and to taste eight wines in two flights with a break in between. These tastings run for about three hours by the time the wines are tasted and the conversations about the wines are finished and the labels revealed. The process severely limits the number of wines I can get into print but it feels right to me in terms of getting the best information I can gather in order to write a cogent tasting note about each wine tasted.

I long ago gave up being a participant in Fair judgings in which I have to taste 100 to 200 wines per day. The only time I break that rule is when I get a chance to travel to some distant land like Oregon or Australia to judge wines. Then the pain of inaccuracy is overcome by the joys of discovery. I will admit, however, that being asked to taste 35 Sparkling Shiraz at nine in the morning with a fair bit of jet lag almost changed my mind.